Independent governor candidate promises 5 percent income tax rate

Wednesday

Aug 13, 2014 at 5:00 PM

Independent candidate for governor Jeff McCormick is newly promising to lower the income tax rate to 5 percent, the level sought by voters when they approved (56 percent to 37 percent) a ballot law in 2000.

Michael Norton/State House News Service

Independent candidate for governor Jeff McCormick is newly promising to lower the income tax rate to 5 percent, the level sought by voters when they approved (56 percent to 37 percent) a ballot law in 2000.

Although that rate may be achieved without the need for any legislative intervention, McCormick plans to achieve it by strategically allowing vacated state jobs to remain unfilled.

McCormick on Tuesday referenced a “temporary” income tax increase signed by former Gov. Michael Dukakis in the late 1980s, saying, “It is time that the hardworking people of Massachusetts receive what they were promised 25 years ago.”

He said that if elected, he would offset the reduction in tax revenues caused by the tax reduction by reducing the state workforce through attrition over his first term.

“Through attrition we can roll back at least 5,000 of the 10,000 new positions created by Governor Patrick since he took office,” McCormick said in a statement.

When the economy faltered after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Legislature in 2002 halted the income tax reduction schedule, freezing the tax rate at 5.3 percent and conditioning future cuts on an economic formula. Triggers since then have whittled the income tax down to 5.2 percent, not the 5.25 percent rate McCormick claimed in his press release Tuesday.

Under current law, the earliest the income tax could hit 5 percent is Jan. 1, 2018. McCormick is pledging a 5 percent rate by the end of 2018.

The tax accounted for more than 57 percent of total state tax revenues in fiscal 2013.